Srinivas, coordinator of public health in Telangana, gave a call to IT companies of Hyderabad to open their offices as these companies provide lot of indirect employment. He urged the companies to function in the same way as they used to do prior to Covid 19. However, both the employers and employees are still not convinced with the proposal of the government.

Employers and employees both benefited by WFH:

Even though Work from home concept has been there in countries like US and UK for so long, Indian companies, except for a few product based companies, did not provide this facility for employees until 2020. However, with Corona pandemic, the functioning style of Indian companies also changed and all the companies provided work from home option to their employees. Employees and employers – both benefited with the WFH culture. Employees saved their time and energy as they could avoid long traffic lines and travel, while employers could save their logistic costs. Some companies even passed their cost savings to employees this year in the form of bonuses.

But some others negatively impacted:

However work from home culture impacted negatively not only the small the employees like housekeeping staff, auto drivers and other small businesses in IT corridor, but also negatively impacted real estate business and petrol bunks. It seems, the associations of real estate and petrol bunks are urging Telangana government to open offices. So, the government now wants the companies to open the offices and justifying its decision by citing the indirect employment to small time employees.

Employees are not welcoming government decision:

However, employees are criticizing government on this and say they are not getting any kind of benefits from the government despite paying huge taxes promptly and they don’t get any additional benefit by working from offices. They are adding, the real estate groups in Hyderabad were rising their prices at ridiculously high rates before pandemic and now also the government is opening offices only upon the pressure from such real estate tycoons. They add, contrary to common perception, the work load didn’t decrease because of work from home but it increased a bit more. But still they prefer work from home because it is economical for them.

However, the companies, even though they want to continue WFH, do not want to go against the government and want to open the offices. Some companies have already asked their top management personal to work from offices.

We need to wait and see whether all IT offices in Hyderabad will get opened by the end of the year.